It’s been weird today. Still haven’t gotten things solved with the one machine but I’m on track to getting it fixed now.

Our tax refund is pretty much spent now. We got tires, clothes, lots of books, misc. Basically we spent indiscriminately and it’s gone as my father is wont to say: “Like a fart in a windstorm.”

I can’t say I’m surprised. We didn’t keep track of it during the weekend and this is the results. Granted we got some nice stuff with that money - among them work shoes for me - but it would have been nice to hold onto it a bit longer.

And truth be told I’m just as responsible for spending it as my wife is. I bought a lot of books and got a couple of things besides my tires. Still we blew through about $1200 in one weekend. That’s not a good thing. :-(

At least we’ll keep track again now that the extra money is gone. The point though is that we should have been keeping track all along.

In other news I’m hopefully going to be taking tomorrow off so I can go in on Sunday. This has the added effect of allowing me to celebrate Ostara without people around which is pretty cool really. I’ve not been spending as much personal time as I should be so the chance to celebrate one of the Sabbats quietly and alone is a much welcome thing.

Looking at more Stirling engine stuff and it’s pretty damn cool. Do you know that I can build a cheap Stirling engine to run a fan to keep the shed cool during summer? I could even set up one to charge batteries slowly off the grid. That’s damn cool to me because it means that if I had enough resources and space I could design and build a dish-based one that could generate power for an entire household. And it wouldn’t have to be all that large either. Heck I could probably get quite a bit of power using one of the old satellite dishes coated with a mirror coating and having the receiver replaced with a Stirling engine. And most of those materials would likely be cheaply made except for perhaps the pistons and bearings.

But as I was recently reminded there are a lot of things on my to-do list that I will likely never get to and this might be one of them. But it would be so cool...